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I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

Comments
  • 1
    welcome to devrant! and stop using VBA,move to something better like python, or JS.
  • 1
    @magicMirror I know, I know. I just haven't had time when I remember that I need to learn something else. When I learned VB.net, the teacher told me that it was a pretty good language that a lot of people still used, and I kinda figured that VBA couldn't hurt to figure out.

    I'm planning on mastering C and Python.
  • 1
    @magicMirror
    Holy cow, I didn't realize how many jobs were based on *maintaining* legacy systems instead of rewriting them.
  • 0
    @CupOfJoe It is not a bad skill to have. Just make sure you never take long legacy projects with it. If no devs are avilable to maintain VB, then the clients will have to upgrade.
  • 0
    @magicMirror That's SO true... and hopefully, I'll be able to upgrade them when that happens. Is C any better?
  • 0
    @CupOfJoe Depends on what you need done. C is good for embedded, and certain specific high performance algorithems. General purpose stuff is usualy done in JS, java, C#.
  • 0
    @magicMirror Okay, thanks! I'll see about C# over the summer, and maybe Java/Script.
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